May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 7: When Free is Not Free, Alabama Widows Lose Their Insurance, Insurance Rates Go Up Along With Tax Rates

Today we trudge through another long day of discussing the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. This will be the seventh post this month on this horrid piece of legislation, written and enacted by a horrid set of politicians in Washington. We have been doing multiple sets of posts every month since last August, not because we like to talk about disasters but because the disasters are eroding our freedoms, eroding our take home pay, curtailing economic growth, and have no chance of ever reducing the skyrocketing health care costs in this country.

1) An article from the news site Newsmax did a nice compilation of articles and analyses of the health care legislation in early April, 2014. Their findings include:

• According to Forbes Magazine, a quarterly survey by investment bank Morgan Stanley of 148 brokers who sell insurance showed that premiums accelerated in the last quarter more than of any of the 12 prior quarterly periods, a spike which happened to coincide with the lead in to the Obama Care deadline.
• This increase may have been the sharpest increase in health insurance premiums than possibly ever.
• The average premium increases for insurance renewals in the most recent quarter were over 11% in the small group health insurance market and 12% in the individual health insurance market.
• Keep in mind that these were double digit increase in just one QUARTER, they are not ANNUAL increases.
• By way of comparison, the survey back in last September showed that increases in the small group market averaged 3 percent, and 2 percent in the individual market. 
• According to the Forbes analysis, in some states the state level increases have been 10 to 50 times those averages, according to Forbes. 
• For example, in the individual insurance market, premiums have increased an average of 100% in Delaware, 90% in New Hampshire, 54% in Indiana, 53% in California, 45% in Connecticut, and 37% in Florida.
• Again, these are just quarterly, three month increases, not annual increases.
• For the small group market, Washington had an average increase of 588%, followed by Pennsylvania at 66%, California at 37%, and Indiana at 34%.
• The even worse news according to the Forbes analysis, the data shows that "rate hikes have accelerated as the legislation’s regulations have started to get implemented. 
• It is believed that the rate increases are due to a combination of four factors triggered by and caused by Obama Care including new commercial underwriting restrictions, age restrictions that prevent insurers from pricing premiums differently between young and old beneficiaries to reflect the actual costs of providing coverage, new excise taxes being levied on insurance plans, and new benefit designs.
• The Newsmax article quotes an analysis that was published in the Daily Caller: "Morgan Stanley's results echo what consumers are already seeing: the Affordable Care Act's intensive regulation of the insurance market is driving healthcare premiums up strikingly.”
• The Washington Post recently reported that in some cases, insurance companies may have "low-balled" prices for 2014 to attract customers, which sounds like a classic “bait and switch" scam, while others will probably raise prices to boost profits or compensate for the costs of participating in the new law.

That is a lot of sources all coming up with the same conclusion: Obama Care policies are more expensive and their impact in the marketplace is resulting in higher, not lower, costs of health insurance. Nowhere is anyone talking about Obama’s promise to lower annual insurance costs by $2,500 for an average American family.

2) The Heritage Foundation has put together an analysis that shows how much of an increase in taxation the Obama Care legislation is expected to cost the American consumer within ten years (double click on the graph for a larger view):

Let’s do a little math:

• Many times in previous posts we have cited government reports that estimate that today, Medicare and Medicaid lose anywhere from $70 to $100 billion a year to criminal fraud and deception. Thus, if Obama and the rest of the Washington political class cared or knew how to run an efficient government operation, no taxes would be required because for about the first seven years we could have funded Obama Care by just fixing the broken processes in Medicare and Medicaid.
• In ten years, the annual cost burden of Obama Care will come out to a little over $1,000 per family per year (assuming that these numbers are not under estimates of reality, a highly likely scenario.) That means in ten years, every American family on average will have $1,000 less to spend on vacations, home improvements, recreation, etc., a stunting of economic growth across the board.

All for a piece of legislation that has no chance of ever, ever being successful.

3) Let’s forget about cost increases and tax increases and pure numbers and look at a human side story of Obama Care. This story was reported by the Independent Journal Review in early April, 2014. Because of new regulations imposed by the Obama Care, more than two dozen widows who were married to Madison County, Alabama county employees are now going without health insurance.

These widows lost their healthcare coverage this year after the county was notified that the new Obama Care regulations rules would cause its independent health insurance program to cost an additional $25 million a year, an incremental expense they could not afford in their budget. As a result of the financial impacts, the county commissioners decided to join a state-wide insurance network that includes 50 other county governments in order to stay solvent while still providing health insurance coverage to their current employees.

However, there was one big downside to this plan, as Dale Strong, Madison County Commission Chairman, warned: “In joining with this large group, it does not provide for spouses when their husbands die or their wives die.”

Roger Jones, Madison County Commissioner, added: “A lot of these people are on low fixed incomes, some of them are living on Social Security and very little else, and health insurance is very important to them.”

It may be important to them and they may have been happy with their previous arrangement but as a result of Obama Care, they no longer have access to their former policies, a fact that Obama promised over and over again would never happen. This is what happens when leaders lie, citizens suffer and end up going without.

4) The lies from this Presidency never stop coming, with a new one recently uncovered and reported on by the Wall Street. One of Obama’s big selling points on Obama Care and Obama Care policies was that annual physicals, covering a range of tests and analyses, would be free to insurance policy holders in the new Obama Care world. 

This emphasis on preventive care would theoretically identify a possible disease or ailment early in its life cycle when it is usually simpler and less expensive to treat. In theory, a good idea. 

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, under the legislation, preventive care includes screenings for high blood pressure and high cholesterol counts, evaluations for several cancers and diabetes, and vaccinations. The patient is allowed, in most cases, one free checkup per year, all promised by the President.

But hold on a minute. Like real life, in the Obama Care world there is often no such thing as free. And how free things become unfree under Obama Care is wild. Obama Care patients who go to their doctors for their free annual checkup are finding out that they may have to pay for the preventive healthcare visit after all. Why? If you mention past or ongoing health concerns during the physical, this will result in co-pays and deductibles and not a free physical, according to The Wall Street Journal analysis.

Under the Obama Care legislation, once you say that you might be sick, that moves the doctor encounter from a preventive or “wellness” care visit to potential new health issues. This subtlety makes the doctor visit to be now viewed as “evaluation and monitoring,” not wellness or preventive, which triggers patients having to fork out for the “free” annual physical. Insanity. 

You cannot tell a doctor how you are feeling or what is ailing you, an exchange that should lead to better and cheaper healthcare, without risking paying for your “free” physical. You cannot make this stuff up it is so idiotic.

Let a doctor explain what happens: “Patients are scheduling physicals because physicals are free,” Randy Wexler, a family physician in Columbus, Ohio, told the Journal. “But they come in and say, ‘I’ve been having headaches. My back has been bothering me, and I’m depressed.’ That’s not part of a physical. That will trigger a copay.”

Wexler went on to say that customers and patients are not happy about the unexpected charges. “They’ll say, ‘I have diabetes and hypertension and heart disease and seeing you is preventing them from getting worse, so that should be fully covered. But under that theory, everything would be free with no copay.”

The Journal article went on to point out other non-productive and wasteful behavior that is being driven by this nonsense:

• Doctors interviewed by the Journal say that seniors have started canceling their annual wellness visits under their Medicare plans when they learn that if they mention a current health issue during the checkup they will likely be charged a co-pay.
• Some doctors are even warning patients in advance of the problem and ask them to schedule two visits, one for the “annual” and another for their current health issue, according to the Journal.

How is any of this productive and health cost reducing, besides being lunacy? When a simple discussion with your doctor about your current health causes you to pay more, we are certainly passing over into another realm of reality. Plus, just when you think another lie cannot possibly be hidden in the Obama Care world, another big jumps up and takes a bite out of your wallet.

5) I am getting tired and depressed so I will end this disaster review for today. However, for a detailed look at how Obama is manipulating the numbers to make this horrid piece of legislation look better than it is, I refer you to the following in-depth analysis at:

http://www.conservativeblog.org/amyridenour/2014/4/17/obama-administration-uses-bogus-insurance-coverage-figures.html

Hopefully, we can wrap this month’s Obama Care disasters tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 6: The Overall Disaster In Pictures

This is our sixth post this month on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. And we still may not be done covering all of the trauma, idiocy, and wasteful spending of this horrid piece of legislation that has popped up in just the last month or so. 

We have been running half a dozen Oabma Care failure posts or so every month since last August, that is how bad this law is turning out to be. The first post in this series did a thorough overview of all the problems along with an in-depth look at why it was doomed to failure from Day One. That post can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/04/may-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html

Today's discussion is centered on a fantastic piece of journalism that recently was done by the Heritage Foundation. They took many of the disasters we have discussed extensively in this blog and put the reality and information into graphs and pictures to make the situation easier to visualize and understand. Below are a dozen or so graphs and pictures from the Heritage Foundation along with some of their commentary and some of ours mixed in

I am pretty sure that after reviewing and understanding these graphs and pictures on what Obama Care is doing to the country and how it is already a failure, you will understand why it has to be repealed and replaced with something that actually attacks the root causes of our high health care costs. The Obama Care approach has nothing to do with solutions to that problem and everything to do with creating another needless Federal bureaucracy that has little chance of being efficient or effecitve.

The orignal Internet post where Hertiage published its findings can be accessed at:

http://www.heritage.org/multimedia/infographic/2014/obamacare-in-pictures-spring-2014/obamacare-in-pictures-slide-14

Note: double click on any of the graphs below for a larger view.

1) According to analysis done by the Heritage Foundation, which reached conclusions similar to other analyses by other organizations, 27 year old Americans are much more likely to be paying more for health insurance premiums as a result of Obama Care vs. how the world was prior to Obama Care. 

If you are a 27 year old American looking for health insurance coverage, in about 90% of the states you will pay more now for insurance premiums than you would have if Obama Care did not exist. This runs counter to the whole promise of Obama Care which was to reduce the cost of health insurance and insurance premiums in this country.

But this should not be a surprise since the financial structure of Obama Care tries to force an intergenerational transfer of wealth from younger, healthier Americans to older, sicker Americans. That was the strategy from Day One so it is not a surprise that some young Americans could end paying more than double for insurance premiums what they would have paid in a non-Obama Care world.


















2) While not as bad as for 27 year olds,  50 year old Americans in the individual health insurance market will also end up paying more for health insurance premiums in an Obama Care world than prior to the legislation, with the exception of five or six states. Many 50 year old Americans could see their insurance premiums go up by over 50%.



3) Not only will the insurance policy premiums be generally much higher for Obama Care policy holders, as the previous two points show, but the cost of the average annual deductible cost will also be much higher relative to employer sponsored insurance deductibles. In many cases, the cost will be orders of magnitude higher. Thus, after all of the hype, all of the angst, and all of the billions and billions of dollars spent on Obama Care, it cannot not even come close to matching what is already present in employer insurance market. Pathetic performance.






4) History shows that the best way for prices to optimized to the advantage of consumers in any marketplace is for there to be robust competition in those marketplaces. That history lesson must have been lost on Obama Care's developers since in more than half of the counties in the country, there is either only one Obama Care insurance carrier available (35%) or only two carriers available (17%). No way prices will be driven down with such meager competition serving the Obama Care exchanges.




5) In March, 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the ten year net cost of the Obama Care legislation would be $898 billion. Less than four years later, as the disasters unfolded, the same organization estimating the current ten year window of Obama Care net costs found that their intital cost estimate was less than half of what their current cost estimate was. I dread to see how high the cost estimates will be in another four years at this rate.




6) Supporters of Obama Care like to think that their legislation at least got more people covered via Mediciad. That might be true to some extent but at what price?  Using Congressional Budget office information, Heritage calculated how much more Obama Care would cost the citizens of each state relative to increased Medicaid costs. 

Overall, the country will pay almost $42 billion more for Obama Care induced Medicaid costs or about $364 for every U.S. household. Some states such as California, Illinois, New York, and Arizona will see per household Medicaid charges that are orders of magnitude higher than the natinal average. All for a piece of legislation that was supposed to reduce health care costs, not increase them by billions of dollars. 



7) Despite the increased Mediciad costs and the doubling of the costs forecasted to implement Obama Care to $2 TRILLION by the Congressional Budget Office, in ten years there will still be a whopping 31 million Americans that do not have health insurance coverage. Only 26 million Americans are forecasted to have picked up coverage, so in ten years the legislation would not even be half way to its stated, overarching goal, getting health insurance coverage for everyone.

Even worse, simple math shows that if this forecast is accurate, it would have cost the country at least $2 TRILLION to get healh care insurance coverage for 25 million people. This computes out to a whopping $80,000 cost to get those 25 million covered! $80,000 for each person. You cannot run a business or a government when you pay so much and get so little for each customer.

Additionally, if I read the above graph correctly on the $2 TRILLION, that number does not apparently include all of the billions of dollars that have been spent up front to set up this monstrosity nor does it include the ongoing costs of operating it. The $2 TRILLION estimate appears to only encompass the increased Medicaid costs and the Federal subsidies. Thus, the $80,000 per person cost we just calculated is probably way too low, given that these other expenses are not figured into the calculation.



8) Remember when the President stated that during his Presidency no American earning less than $250,000 would pay more in taxes while he was in office? Well, another promise (or another Presidential lie) broken since according to the Congressional Budget Office, almost 70% of those that are likley to pay the Obama Care individual mandate tax earn less than about $46,000 a year and 10% of that almost 70% actually live below the poverty line. So much for the $250,000 threshold.



9) Many times we have pointed out, and no one who supports the Obama Care has denied this reality, that the legislation intentionally reduced future Medicare expenses (by over $700 billion) and switched those expenses to the Obama Care business case and financial views to make it more appealing. However, if these reductions actually happen, an analysis from the Medicare Trustees shows that by not inititating true reductions in health care costs, Obama Care's Medicare budget reduction plans will cause upwards of 40% of hospitals, nursing facilities, and home health agencies to operate at a financial loss in the coming decades.

This financial squeeze in the absence of real and effective health care industry reform will either cause these facilities to shut down or stop taking on Medicare patients. In either case, this Obama Care strategy will cause there to eventually be a new health care crisis, this one centered on the fact there are not enough health care professionals available to service the Medicare population.






10) So far, Obama Care has caused between 5 and 6 million Americans, who had gotten their health insurance coverage via the individual, non-employer market, to lose access to their preferred insurance plans, their preferred doctors, and their preferred hospitals. However, the real tsunami of disruption will come when the delayed provisions of Obama Care hit employers' health insurance plans. 

A recent survey of employers found that a whopping 92% of them expected changes to be done to their companies' health insurance plans, with almost half of them expecting substantial changes. Thus, in a year from now, that 5 to 6 million Americans who lost their insruance coverage might look like a rounding error when the employer operated insruance plans get the once over from Obama Care.




11) Supporters of Obama Care like to assume that when Medicare and Social Security were launched, there were operational problems with them also and that somehow, miraculously Obama Care will work itself out over time just like Social Security and Medicare. There are a few fallacies with this reasoning:

• Over time, the original cost projections for both Social Security and Medicare exploded  far beyond the original estimates, so much so that just these two Federal government programs threaten the financial integirty and viability of the entire country. Thus, comparing Obama Care to these two bloated and inefficient programs is probably not a good idea, especially since the expected Obama Care costs have more than doubled in just four years.
• Social Security and Medicare were launched with bipartisan Congressional support and support among the country's citizen's.  Obama Care was launched with only Demcoratic support, no Republicans signed on to this lousy piece of legislation and as the following chart shows, the majority of citizens never supported Obama Care in the first place, contrary to the other two massive programs, programs that are failing anyway despite bipartisan Congressional support and popular citizen support.

12) And finally back to the lie of the year, the President stating over and over through the years that if you liked your current health care policy you could keep it. The following chart from the Associated Press gives a state by state breakdown of the number of Americans that indeed did lose access to their current and preferred insurance plans, despite the President's assertion. 

The Associated Press analysis and map show that 4.7 million Americans lost access to their insurance policy. However, that estimate does not include every state because informaiton was not available for every state. Thus, you can rest assured that the 4.7 million is off by quite a bit, especially since that figure did not include high population states like Texas and Ohio. 

If we ratio the number of people living in Texas to the number of people living in California and then use that ratio to get a very rough estimate of how many people lost access ot the policies in Texas based on the 1.1 million who lost access in California, we can easily support a Texas estimate of over 700,000 people who lost their insurance coverage in Texas. Thus, it is not to hard to see that upwards of 6 million Americans across the country have already lost access to insurance policies that they were happy to pay for and carry.

        

That will do it for today. The unfolding disasters of Obama Care in pictures. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these Obama Care "pictures" are worth $2 TRILLION and millions of newly uninsured Americans as a result of a piece of legislation that is doomed to failure today and ten years from today.

More disaster reviews for Obama Care tomorrow. 

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 5: Cutting Nurses' Pay, Cutting Lose A Failed Obama Care Website, and Senior Citizens Sound Off

This is the fifth post this month in our continuing series that follows the unending and unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Since last August, we have usually had to dedicate five or six days of posts to review the disasters that come out of Obama Care on what seems like a daily basis. This month is no exception, as the legislation continues to exceed its costs projections, miss its revenue and enrollment projections, wreck havoc with the health of millions of Americans, and erode our freedoms and liberties.

Previous months’ reviews can be accessed via the menu of choices on the right side of this page.

1) The NBC TV news affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina recently covered a story affecting the pay of nurses at the Caromont Health hospital in Gastonia, North Carolina. Apparently, in the past, the hospital started hiring nurses in a special category that gave them a 25% pay increase but no health of other benefits.

This arrangement worked well for a lot of nurses, especially those that were covered by their spouses health care plans and thus, did not need duplicative coverage form their nursing job, preferring instead a 35% increase in salary. But alas, as a full time employee, working more than 30 hours a week, Obama Care says these nurses have to be given full health care coverage even though they do not need it or do not want it, preferring more cash in their paycheck.

The hospital determined that they could not afford to provide health care coverage and maintain the 25% pay premium so those nurses are being forced to take a 25% pay cut directly as a result of the Obama Care legislation. Just another instance where Obama Care is reducing the freedom of choice for Americans, forcing a one size fits all non-solution on every American’s life style and preferences.

2) Yesterday we reported on how the state of Oregon shut down its Obama Care health exchange website after failing to sign up a single customer, despite spending tens of millions of dollars. Well, not to be outdone, the Washington Post recently reported that the state of Maryland, which spend over $90 million on technology development including its website for Obama Care policies, is also being shut down. This comes six months after the state continued struggling to make the website for the state health insurance exchange to work. 

Yes, six months of fixing, tens of millions of dollars wasted, and the state is going to give up and start over using a copy of the Connecticut’s more successful website. Unfortunately, Maryland’s Obama Care exchange received millions in Federal taxpayer dollars to build its exchange website so it is not just the Maryland taxpayer who got screwed by their incompetence, we all did. The most ironic thing about the whole affair was that this failed Maryland website somehow was awarded early innovator grants, grants that earned the effort even more taxpayer funding. 

But the website crashed on the first day of open enrollment and Maryland officials were never unable to fix it. I wonder if they had to give back the innovator grants and if the Feds will go after them to retrieve the Federal taxpayer money they received. Also makes you wonder who n the world gave them awards for a website that never worked. Pathetic.

The budget breakdown of the waste, for a website that never worked, included the following details:

• $129.8 to create and host the exchange as a whole, not just the website.
• The website that’s already been tossed aside cost an incredible $91.7 million.
• Maryland spent $49.9 million on the development of the exchange, $11 million for hosting the website, and$3 million for website maintenance.
• The state also $8.1 million on a small business Obama Care exchange, which was never launched.
• Other costs outside of the massive budget included salaries at $6.4 million; advertising at $6.2 million; additional consultants for $3.2 million; training at $3.3 million; and a combined $13.3 million for navigators, assisters and call centers for those seeking help with the health care law and the shoddy state website.

Unbelievable incompetence.

3) One facet of the unfolding disaster that we have not talked about enough is that in order for the Obama Care financials to look reasonable, the president arbitrarily reduced the future Medicare budget by about $700 billion over the next ten years. Arbitrary in that he provided not mechanism or strategy for drastically reducing the costs without drastically reducing the benefits for our senior citizens.

Now those numbers and the grueling impact that arbitrary reductions is having on seniors is starting to come to light. In mid-April the Minority Report website provided an anecdotal list from various sources that showed how the Medicare reduction as a result of Obama Care is directly and currently making life more difficult for senior citizens:

- “Obama Care’s Medicare Advantage cuts will lead to benefit reductions of about $1,500 per beneficiary, according to a new analysis from a conservative think tank. The American Action Forum, founded by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said almost all Medicare Advantage beneficiaries will feel the effect of cuts to the program.” (“Study: Cuts To Medicare Advantage Top $1,500 Per Senior,” National Journal, 4/17/14)

- “Roughly 30 percent of Medicare beneficiaries—about 16 million seniors—use the privately administered Medicare Advantage plans.”(“Study: Cuts To Medicare Advantage Top $1,500 Per Senior,” National Journal, 4/17/14)

- Obama Care: $308 Billion In Medicare Advantage Cuts 

MEDICARE ADVANTAGE CUTS: 

CBO: ‘Medicare Advantage Rates… 156 [billion dollars]’ “Changes in outlays from direct spending… Medicare Advantage Rates… 2013-2022: 156 [billion dollars]”(Douglas Elmendorf, CBO Director, Letter To Speaker Boehner, P.5, 7/24/12)

CBO: “Our estimate of the interaction between the FFS provisions and payment rates for MA [Medicare Advantage] plans is $152 billion.” (CBO, E-Mail To Senate Staff, 7/24/12)

CBO: “The sum of those two effects is $308 billion.” (CBO, E-Mail To Senate Staff, 7/24/12)

- Kentucky Senior: “Following the last Medicare Advantage Program decrease in federal funding tied to Obama Care, my premiums doubled and I was faced with a $500 deductible that I didn’t have before. …this was sticker shock…” (Sen. McConnell, Constituent Mail, 1/18/14)

- Utah Seniors: “My husband and I have been personally affected by the recent healthcare reforms that resulted in $200 billion in funding losses to Medicare Advantage. Our medical providers informed us that they are no longer participating in our plan.” (Sen. Hatch, Constituent Mail, 1/27/14)

- Connecticut Senior: “Dorathy Senay’s doctor had some bad news after her last checkup, but it wasn’t about her serious blood disorder called amyloidosis. Her Medicare Advantage managed care plan … is terminating the doctor’s contract Feb. 1. She is also losing her oncologist at the prestigious Yale Medical Group — the entire 1,200 physician practice was axed.” (“UnitedHealthCare Medicare Advantage Cuts Doctors,” Kaiser Health News, 11/29/13)

- New York Senior: ‘Obama had said I could keep my doctor. Now they’re doing away with my doctor. They kicked him out! After 20 years, that’s not right’ “ObamaCare is making seniors sick. Elderly New Yorkers are in a panic after getting notices that insurance companies are booting their doctors from the Medicare Advantage program as a result of the shifting medical landscape under ObamaCare… [Dr. Jonathan] Leibowitz’s patients are furious. Alfred Gargiulio, who has cerebral palsy with a seizure disorder, has been seeing Leibowitz since 1993. ‘Obama had said I could keep my doctor. Now they’re doing away with my doctor. They kicked him out! After 20 years, that’s not right. We love Dr. Leibowitz,’ said Gargiulio.” (“Elderly Patients Sick Over Losing Doctors Under Obamacare,” New York Post, 10/25/13)

- Florida Senior: “The AARP managed care network [George Smith] had relied on for years will drop all eight of his and his wife’s doctors as of Jan. 1. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I have my house and car and everything insured through AARP,’ said Smith, 73. ‘I thought, “They are not going to drop me. I’ve been a member for years.”’ … Patients have received letters telling them to seek new physicians if they want to stay on the plan. Doctors … have learned that AARP plans will stop paying for their services next year.” (“Patients Scramble After AARP Medicare Advantage Plans Drop Providers,” Tampa Bay Times, 10/21/13)

- Kentucky Seniors: It’s “tough for seniors to have to find new doctors, especially for those who live in a rural area. It means traveling greater distances and spending more on gas. It is a sad thing when good doctors leave a plan because of funding cuts.” (Sen. McConnell, Constituent Mail, 1/31/14)

- New York Senior: ‘It hurts, it hurts inside and it’s a terrible feeling to think that you can’t get what you want’ “Doctors are getting bumped off plans and their patients are getting worried, Brennan reported. ‘I just can’t believe it because this is the man you rely on,’ heart patient Leonard Goldberg, 82, said. ‘It hurts, it hurts inside and it’s a terrible feeling to think that you can’t get what you want,’ Tony Molesphini, 83, said. ‘Nobody wants to die, me above all people,’ 79-year-old Jim Heffernan said. The three men with heart trouble say their biggest problem is losing the doctor they’ve had for decades, and they fear for their future. … They claim that they that this is a way of cutting costs which they have to do because they are getting a reduction in their reimbursement for the Medicare Advantage plans due to the Affordable Care Act,” [Dr. David Hess] told Brennan.” (“Doctors Dropped By Insurers As Affordable Care Act Rollout Continues,” CBS New York, 11/1/13)

- Florida Senior: “A Medicare Advantage plan that covers 35,000 beneficiaries in Southwest Florida is dropping at least 300 doctors and hard-to-find medical specialists from its Southwest Florida network… Cape Coral resident Joseph Ryan said his 92-year-old mother will lose access to her regular dermatologist, orthopedist and gastroenterologist, among others. He’s heard similar stories involving scores of doctors from others. ‘That’s an awful lot of doctors and an awful lot of people who are going to have to figure out what to do in January,’ Ryan said. ‘It’s not just one or two doctors.’”(“United Healthcare Dumps Doctors,” The News-Press, 10/18/13)

Sad, sad stories. We know now that the President lied when he said that you could keep your preferred insurance plans, your preferred, doctors, and access to your preferred hospitals if Obama Care was passed. Not only did all of those promises get broken but it looks like there is massive collateral damage of the same kind (lost access to preferred policies, doctors, and hospitals) in the Medicare arena as well. All because this President insisted on cooking the books and business case in favor of Obama Care.

That is enough depressing news for today (expensive useless websites, pay cuts for nurses, and trauma for America’s senior citizens), more to come tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 4: Spending Trillions To Insure Millions, Identity Theft Problems, The Oregon Implosion, and More

Okay, I have been putting this off as long as possible but it is that time of month where we need to go through the latest unfolding disasters of the Obama Care legislation. Earlier this week we reviewed the totality of the disasters from this horrid law along with a list of root causes behind our high health care costs that the legislation never addressed. That post can be read at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/04/may-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is.html

Over the past two days we have been reviewing the many ways that health care costs and health insurance costs could be reduced dramatically without 2,500 pages of useless regulations from Washington. Those posts can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/04/may-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is_29.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/04/may-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is_30.html

The next series of posts will go through the disasters that have arisen just over the past month or so. We will hit them pretty fast, given how many of them there are. For a more detailed view of what went wrong and what should have been done to address the high costs problem, please refer back to the three posts listed above.

1) The first discussion point today is a parody that was created by some creative people somewhere that fully captures the disaster that is Obama Care. The basis of the parody is a pretty famous clip from a German movie about World War II and takes place in Hitler’s bunker towards the end of the war. 

The clip keeps the original German soundtrack and dialog but overdubs different words onto the screen to completely change the meaning of the clip. This clip has been used many times in many different areas including explaining how the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots in two Super Bowls for those of you looking for other parodies using the same scene.

This version adjusts the dubbed dialog to reflect the many disasters of Obama Care including Hitler losing his preferred doctor, his current insurance plan, paying higher premiums, etc. Enjoy the parody at:

http://safeshare.tv/w/jyeqLxShwx

2) The Democrats in Oregon were one of the earliest and most avid supporters of Obama Care. They went all out to push for a state based Obama Care health insurance exchange website and process and spent millions of dollars advertising the availability of Obama Care policies through their state exchange.

But as we previously reported, the website supporting the health exchange has been a nightmare, with some news reports saying that no one or virtually no one in the state of Oregon was able to sign up for Obama Care via the Oregon website. Virtually no one despite spending at least tens of millions of dollars in constructing the website.

How bad was the experience? On April 24, 2014, the newspaper The Oregonian, reported that Oregon’s top information technologies official was recommending Cover Oregon, the Obama Care effort in Oregon, scrap the state’s online health insurance exchange that failed to sign up a single resident. Alex Pettit, Oregon’s Chief Information Officer, recommended to a 16-member technical advisory committee that Cover Oregon should drop its glitch-filled website and join the Federal government’s online insurance exchange, which also has been pretty much a disaster from day one

Unfortunately for taxpayers, Oregon has received more than $305 million in Federal grants for the state’s health exchange and, since January 16, has spent nearly $200 million through Cover Oregon and the Oregon Health Authority. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars, the website has never worked properly and Oregon applicants were forced to use a “costly, time-consuming, hybrid paper-online process,” according to The Associated Press.

Pettit told the technical committee that it was a more expensive to partially fix the state’s website, $78 million, with no guarantee the problems would be fixed, than what the original cost estimate for the whole development of the website was, $40 million. To add insult to injury, Cover Oregon is one of several Obama Care state exchanges under investigation by the General Accountability Office which will audit the process and effort to see if there was criminal or negligent use of taxpayer wealth.

Unbelievable, you cannot make up such incompetence. These folks at both the Federal and state level cannot build a relatively simple website and they want to run the nation’s health care industry. Heaven help us.

3) While the website was a huge factor in lower than expect signups for Obama Care in Oregon, the associated advertising campaign could not have been very helpful either. One of their TV commercials can be viewed at the following link:

http://www.bankruptingamerica.org/cover-oregon-buyers-remorse-friday-funnies/#.U1qqPsd4T6F

After viewing the ad, ask yourself: what compelling reason did the ad provide to make you rush out and sign up for an Obama Care policy? Answer: absolutely none. No call to action, no cost vs. benefits sell, just a poorly done cartoon of fluff. And apparently this commercial and others cost taxpayers over $3 million to develop and air. 

If you were just looking at the graphics and music I contend that this could have been an ad for anything from laundry detergent to shampoo to a Saturday morning kids show, that is how innocuous and ineffective it is. Insane. I wonder what the “bad” advertising concepts looked like, the ones that were rejected in favor of this piece of nothing.

4) The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) continually churns out new numbers on Obama Care as the disasters unfold. The latest numbers are not good, as the operational costs continue to go up while the number of Americans who attain insurance continue to see their estimated premium costs go up:

• The CBO now predicts that the net impact on the national debt over the next ten years as a result of the Obama Care legislation will be $1.383 TRILLION. Remember that the original promise from this administration is that the deficit would not go up at all.
• This increase in the national debt of almost $1.4 TRILLION will only get 26 million more Americans covered by an insurance policy.
• This comes out to a whopping per person coverage cost of over $53,000 per person ($1.383 TRILLION divided by 26 million newly insured.) 
• The really sad part from this new analysis is that the original purpose of Obama Care was to get health insurance coverage for EVERY American. The CBO’s latest analysis shows that ten years from now, 31 million Americans will still not have insurance coverage, five million more than the 26 million Americans that do attain coverage. Thus, Obama Care will not cover even half of those it was supposed to help. Pathetic.

The detailed CBO findings can be read at:

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/43900-2014-04-ACAtables2.pdf

5) Although the Obama administration spent well over $700 million building and rebuilding its flawed Federal Obama Care exchange website, an Associated Press article from April 19, 2014 pointed out that this effort is possibly infected with the so-called Heartbleed Internet security flaw. As a result, users of the Obama Care Federal exchange website are being told to change their passwords as a precaution.

Obama administration officials said there is no indication that the HealthCare.gov site has been affected and the action is being taken out of an abundance of caution. The government review is ongoing, the officials said, noting that users of other websites may also be told to change their passwords in the coming days, including those with accounts on the popular WhiteHouse.gov petitions page.

Hundreds of millions of dollars and yet another example of the government’s systems actually being an “identity thief’s paradise.”

That will do it for today’s disasters. Hitler loses under Obama Care, Oregonians lose under Obama Care, trillions spent to insure millions, and more identity theft troubles. Just a typical day in Obama Care land. More to follow tomorrow.

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